Chocolate can make you happy. Yes,
this is definitely true especially for those chocolate lovers. But chocolate can
make your heart happy! It sound contradicting to what you are normally told :
"Don't take too much chocolate, it will increase your weight, and over-weight is
a risk factor for heart disease." Is this some kind of joke? No, this is true
because a small study conducted in 2005 by University of L'Aquila in Italy had
found that dark chocolate (not milk chocolate) may help reduce blood pressure
and boost body's ability to metabolize sugar from food.

Investigation revealed that after
eating only 100 g of dark chocolate everyday for 15 days, 15 healthy people had
lower blood pressure and were more sensitive to insulin, an important factor in
metabolizing sugar. However, for this same group of people, eating roughly the
same amount (90 g) of milk chocolate for the same period of time (15 days) did
not affect either their blood pressure or insulin sensitivity.

High level of a kind of
antioxidant called flavonoids can be found in dark chocolate. Flavonoids can
help maintain a healthy heart and good circulation, and reduce blood clotting
that could lead to heart attack and stroke. Flavonoids help the body by
neutralizing potentially cell-damaging substances known as oxygen-free radicals,
which are a normal by-product of metabolism.

Type of chocolate does matter as
this have been confirmed by two other researches. One study showed that eating
milk chocolate could hardly raise antioxidant levels in the blood possibly
because milk interferes with the absorption of antioxidants from chocolate. The
other one found that there was a drop in blood pressure for a group of elderly
people eating dark chocolate bars, but not milk chocolate that contains no
flavonoids.

The above finding is no doubt a
good news for chocolate lovers as this will give them a perfectly good excuse to
consume more chocolate, dark one, of course. But, dark chocolate does contain a
lot of fat and calories. Each 100 g of dark chocolate contains roughly 500
calories. Therefore, if you intend to add more dark chocolate to your diet, you
definitely need to cut down the equivalent amount of calories absorbed from
other foods to avoid possible weight gain.

It is good that scientists conduct
investigations to identify healthy foods and understand how food components
influence normal physiology as this will help to improve the health of our
population. Because of the technology available, more and more researches on
foods will be conducted and reported to the public. But, does it mean that we
should follow every recommendation that emerged from each and every research?
Probably different people will have difficult answers depending on how the
findings will affect them.